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> engineers and technical people whose jobs you don't understand

If you're CEO and you don't understand what your engineers do, you're in trouble.

I imagine you're being facetious.

Not being facetious actually - the finer details of technical work and engineering evolve so rapidly that there's a really, really good chance you don't know how any given engineer does what he does. You should understand the basic objective of his job, certainly - but let's take for example someone whose whole job is to get data and analytics and prepare recommendations for marketing based on them. You get the idea - this person gives you thoughts on what's selling, what isn't, and how you can do better. But what the hell are they doing, really, actually? More sophisticated analytics and datamining are constantly becoming available, and if you don't read up on it, how would you know?

How many CEOs right now know about "canonical" now being recognized by search engines? That's the kind of thing one of your people can explain to you - "Check this out boss, we now set the canonical entry for each piece, and we control which links show up in the search engine when we put out 3-4 similar versions. I've spent the last few days updating all our archives, so you should see more consistency when current users and outside people search through the archives." And then the boss goes - "Whoa, that's awesome. Party on." Or at least that's how it should work! Airline CEOs who never do flightattending have doomed companies. Those that do have a fighting chance.

There's a big difference between understanding a job and being able to do it.

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